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It’s early during my first play as Calvin Wright, a tormented guardian willing to sacrifice body and soul for the residents of Arkham. Sitting in hushed silence, I hide on a bridge wedged between the Northside and the Merchant District. A bloated half-man/half-fish gives a guttural croak as he patrols the nearby cobblestones.

I draw an encounter card, and a mogul in a top hat and suit struts up the middle of the bridge, flanked by a couple of ruffians. They’re hauling a human-shaped object bound in cloth—which they heave into the river. Top hat stops, finally recognizing me, and reaches into his pocket. “You never saw us here,” he remarks, pressing a wad of cash into my palm. I quietly grab the money and carry on, as that’s all a weary citizen can do.

Arkham Horror Third Edition is a classic struggle of agency versus impotence, set in the uncanny world of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. It’s a tight and structured design, one much cleaner than its previous iteration. At times, the game can almost feel as if you’re on rails, churning toward impending doom with little say in the matter.

Much of the focus is found in the narrative framework. Instead of investigative wanderlust, you’re responding to constant premonitions of doom. These tokens pop up across the modular map, amassing in spaces until they eventually open an anomaly, ripping apart time and space.

Game details

The proliferation of “doom” is a direct nod to the ubiquitous Pandemic. Arkham Horror’s revised design, in fact, comes across as a hodgepodge of influences, including Fantasy Flight’s own Mansions of Madness, Eldritch Horror, and even the recent Fallout board game. The result is a compilation of recent in-house design sensibilities at Fantasy Flight. The largest challenge facing the company’s Arkham Files line of games is that everyone has borrowed from each other’s collection of ideas so much that the products can feel a bit same-y.

But Arkham Horror Third Edition comes out, Tommy gun blazing, fighting with all the will of the world to establish a unique identity.

Telling a story

The new game takes its cue from the Arkham Horror Living Card Game, mixing branching narrative scenarios with a constricted board filled with cardboard occupants. Out are the flat monster tokens of old Arkham; in are the small cards of the LCG.

When you run into a foe (or rather when they run into you) their card is removed from the board and placed next to your investigator sheet. You are then “engaged” with the monster (don’t worry, no one expects custom vows) and must evade or eviscerate the damned thing before you can proceed.

Fighting is very clean, taking the form of a simple strength test. Evading is straightforward, as it exhausts the enemy if you succeed. Horror checks are gone. Everything has an intensely streamlined feel that keeps the drama rolling and the tension high.

While spending your limited actions to move and clean up the spreading “doom,” you’re continually eyeing the card archive. This system of narrative cues is derived straight from the Fallout board game. Scenarios will have you place certain cards in play, shaping your goals and offering branching decisions.

Much of this is framed as a tense race. You must scurry about collecting clue tokens before the scenario sheet collects a wealth of doom. Putting out fires while still tending to your own objectives is the central challenge of play. It establishes roles for players to adopt as they support each other and struggle to hold the door against the encroaching cosmic horror.

It all works incredibly well. As you push the pace, the card codex will see turnover, one accomplishment or failure leading to the next story beat. The formula is compelling because you begin in the dark with the truth slowly unveiling over time; even your overall objective is initially unknown.

With each turn of a card, the next act is revealed, and in a flash the world can end, devoured in the misshapen gullet of an entity beyond mortal comprehension.

Some of the characters you can play.

Cultists infiltrate the Merchant District.

The card codex.

The Deep Ones invade.

Tighter, but less replayable

This shift from open-ended adventure to focused narrative is the defining characteristic of this revision. It offers meaningful story that’s told to as much as by you, which can result in fantastic moments of coherent storytelling.

It also presents a serious challenge in providing extended surprise. Once you’ve played a given setup a couple of times and pushed through the two or three forks in its structure, you will likely want to move on. The four included scenarios dictate which monsters are included, what events are seeded in the deck, and your overall purpose of play. The sequence of occurrences and your decisions will vary, but one of the strongest assets of this design will fade over time.

This is further hampered by the thin location decks. Each small set of cards corresponds to a map space and dictates what random encounters are available. After several trips to the diner, you begin to feel the repetition.

The result is that Third Edition can feel like it's leading you about by the nose. As clue and doom tokens manifest, you will have little control in your journey’s destination.

Rowing along with the flow restrains creativity, but it does offer some advantages. This revision is a much shorter experience than both Eldritch Horror and the older Arkham Horror. It also arguably captures its themes more effectively. As you engage the breadcrumbs of story, you gain a sense of immersion that was previously unattainable. For all its restrictions, this is a game that nails its subject matter.

This accomplishment is the work of designer Nikki Valens. She offers a strong editorial touch, providing numerous tweaks to the Arkham Horror formula that are subtle yet effective. This is seen in the new Mythos gameplay phase that has players drawing tokens out of a cup to spawn monsters, spread doom, and seed clues. This influences the arc of play, and the game achieves a sense of climax superior to its predecessors.

A matter of expansions

The burning question is whether all this is enough. Does Third Edition justify its existence? For a newcomer to these types of games, it’s a no-brainer: this is the most effective game of its ilk and a worthy experience. For those boasting a shelf of Arkham Files releases, though, the answer becomes murky. Seasoned players may not find enough new or replayable elements here.

This release is more foundational than exhaustive. With only four scenarios and a limited set of options, much is riding on Third Edition’s future inevitable game expansions.

For all its iteration, this revised Arkham Horror is unlikely to blow your horror-stricken mind. Yet it’s still a solid improvement on a sturdy infrastructure. This is the strongest version of FFG Lovecraft we’ve seen, even if it’s a cobbled-together Frankenstein’s monster of its brothers and sisters.

This shift from open-ended adventure to focused narrative is the defining characteristic of this revision. It offers meaningful story that’s told to as much as by you, which can result in fantastic moments of coherent storytelling.

I assume this was done on purpose to sell expansions that move the story along.

Being a fantasy flight game I have no doubt that are multiple expansions being furiously designed as we speak.

I was skeptical about the new board at first but it's grown on me. Hopefully expansions will integrated into it better then 2nd edition did.

Replayability is a concern though as after the seven it so plays of the learning scenario I'm kind of burnt out on that and not quite sure I want to move on. The card game had the same effect and it sits over in the shelf now.

An annoyance is the common item vs curio cards. If you wanted me to treat them differently, why are they in the same deck. Ex. Draw one common item, so I have to dig through the item to find a card marked common item.

The one thing I still haven't decided I like is the mythos cup. After a couple of plays we ended up house ruling that you each only draw one token a player at the end of the round. Maybe we interpreted the rules wrong but two tokens per player felt way too strong.

The limited replayability and small size of the decks are my biggest complaints of the most recent Lovecraft games, and I’m frustrated to hear that’s still a problem here. I remember in Eldritch Horror I started seeing repeat cards during my very first game and in the Arkham Horror LCG, we played through all of the included scenarios in a single night. And now it sounds like both of those problems are in this game too.

Contrast that with Arkham Horror 2nd Edition, which I probably played a dozen times with the base game alone and would maybe get one card I saw the game before. Even now after playing probably 60 games, I still feel like each game is wholly unique and fresh.

I get that Fantasy Flight loves expansions, but is it too much to ask for a $60+ base game that I can play more than a couple of times before I feel like I’ve run out of content and have to buy expansions?

Well done review. There aren’t enough encounter cards, we cycled the monster deck twice in our first game, and we didn’t buy Mansions because twice through the intro scenario showed limited replayability, where each game of Arkham 2e (even 50+ games in) and Eldritch 20 games) can feel significantly different.

I’d like more encounter cards, and more variants on gameplay (different coded cards maybe)within the same scenario. That said, yeah, the storytelling definitely makes it feel more compelling, and we were definitely within site of both losing and losing investigators multiple times, and we agonized over the choices to make.

1. I already own all of 2nd edition2. With the move to 3rd edition they completely pulled the Arkham Horror app from all of the app stores meaning now when I do replay it I have to deal with hundreds of location cards (something the app handled fantastically)3. And as stated by the reviewer the story is told to you rather than by you

The game is also significantly easier than 2nd edition when it comes to difficulty. In 2nd edition you might end up going through a couple of investigators as you madly dashed about the city and surrounding towns to stop the big bad. Now it is more like an idle stroll with no real threat or danger and I’ve noticed that about most of their games now. The LotR LCG which the Arkham LCG is based on is brutal and even with experienced players usually took a few times playing through the story to win. In the Arkham Horror LCG we’ve been playing on the hardest difficulty with no real challenge.

I definitely do not like FFG as much post their sale to Asmodee. The quality of components has stayed the same but the quality of the mechanics and the challenge of the games has tremendously declined, and their support is not near as good.

Fantasy Flight Games are like the EA/Activision/Ubisoft of the gaming world. Make a great game, then remove content for DLC turning the $60 game into a $100 game for the full experience when the next update arrives with more scenarios.

I've got the original giant board game version and I won't be changing.

tbh, this is so different it would be better giving it a new game. Like with Eldrich Horror.